Core post 4: Data resignation

When we talked about reaching the theme of surveillance, I was expecting to find it in the week's heading, or as a part of the descriptions. I dove into the readings, unprepared to be paranoid–I ended up replacing my paranoia with resignation, while looking at all the devices surrounding me, tracing my every move. I usually don't interrupt my reading to do a query. I did: I paused to find what Google thought of me; I paused again, to search for an SNL video I meant to reference in this post; I paused out of curiosity, to see if I could find Angry Birds buried in my iPad's unused apps–I wanted to find the privacy policies that came with the flying pigs. When I came across my ads preferences in Google, I was disappointed; perhaps being logged in to the browser (I have neglected using Firefox) shares a lot more of my information, reason why I found a great accuracy with my age range. Or maybe I just fit into Google's intersected patterns of behavior, based on the input data I have shared. I still can't help but wonder, if my identity is framed according to its corresponding problematics of engineering, would the intersections/multilayered connections of race-gender-class be any different if it weren't a white-male-capitalist enterprise that was looking at my data?

Several of the passages made me think back on Ruha Benjamin's talk at the Annenberg Research Seminar this past Tuesday. What she calls the new Jim Code I saw materialized on the usage of dirty data. Even when these systems that analyze–and allegedly predict–place-based/person-based crimes (whatever that means) exist, it makes me critical about by resignation of their existence, of their productive and production of racism, of the coproduction that exists between race and technology, of the captivating aspects of technology which we embrace, and only as an afterlife, we are critical of our captivating captivity. Citing Sherry Turkle's Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, "I share therefore I am," leads me–once more– to critically examine my own sharing practices. We aggregate information on browsers, and social media, populating these spaces with cheap nature (Couldry and Mejias, 2019), making ourselves available to capital. However, when thinking of Jodie Dean's idea com Communicative Capitalism, it is the overflow of information that, in the end, makes us lacking of political action –or which makes political action impossible. Are we silencing ourselves by sharing data and not cleaning up that data? Is there an escape to the ever-present surveillance technologies? Should we rather not be included, even when that entails being racialized?